Disentangling Discursive Spaces of Knowledge Refused by Science: An Analysis of the Epistemic Structures in the Narratives Repertoires on Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This chapter provides an understanding of the social configurations with which Refused Knowledge Communities (RKCs) attribute credibility to knowledge about healthcare and wellbeing. This study focuses on how RKCs enrol knowledge claims and heterogeneous actors to build, maintain and legitimise forms of knowledge refused by science. The analysis relies on empirical materials related to the online discourses shared in the Alkaline Water (AW) and Five Biological Laws (5BLs) RKCs from January 2020 to December 2021—a time span characterised by the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the management of the related health crisis—by identifying in each RKC distinct claims of refused knowledge and the actors that sustain these claims. Through a combination of qualitative analysis and network-analytic techniques, we examine the epistemic structures of the AW and 5BLs RKCs and formalise the connections between claims and actors within each RKC by a two-mode network in which claims are connected to actors. By means of community detection, we provide a visual analysis of the configuration of claim–actor connections, while using betweenness centrality scores to denote ‘flexible’ objects that link diverse sub-groups of nodes—that is, claims or actors that act as ‘boundary objects’ within these complex social worlds.